Tranny

by Laura Jane Grace

  I would close the Top every night with the bartender, C.C. She was eight years older than me, married with a kid. Her face was beautiful while still carrying a natural “fuck you” expression, which scared the hell out of me. She dyed her already jet-black hair even blacker, and wore it short at her chin. The upper halves of her arms were covered in tattoos; an angel on one side, the devil on the other. We got to know each other while I mopped the floors and she counted out the register and restocked the bar.

  We were both unhappy in our marriages, neither of us really wanting to go home at the end of our shifts, so we’d draw out the time as long as we could, sometimes not leaving until after the sun had come up. C.C. would pour drinks. Her singles were triples. We’d shoot a couple games of pool, down a few pints, and do a couple more lines of blow, although C.C. preferred to shoot her cocaine. She would play all her favorite songs for me on the jukebox, and I’d play all of mine for her. She loved Springsteen, and I forced Bob Dylan on her. Late nights closing the bar with C.C. helped to avoid the misery waiting for me at home. We got high together, instead of getting high alone.

  It wasn’t enough to stay out of the house; I wanted to stay out of Gainesville. I put my focus on the band as a sure escape from the town. We booked a summer tour; our first with an actual full-length album to promote. We were drawing more people than most of the bands we played with, though I was still insistent we maintain our anti-capitalist stance, and split any cash equally among all the bands playing each show. We still made enough to pay rent when we came back.

  Dustin waited until the tour was almost over to break the news: he decided he wanted to go back to college and would be leaving the band after the tour ended. I understood his reasons, but was still sad to see him go. We had been playing in bands together since we were 13 years old, and I knew this was an end of those times. We were down a bassist, right when our momentum was starting to build. But by a stroke of serendipity, I got a random email.

  “Kick the bass player out of your band and let me join,” Andrew Seward joked in the email.

  “It’s funny you should say that…” I wrote back.

  Andrew was a stranger, really. We had only crossed paths twice before. He lived in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and played in a band called Kill Devil Hills, with whom we had once played a show in Tallahassee. He had stage presence, and I liked the way he danced, always smiling and full of energy. He was in without a tryout. I told him that all he had to do was move to Gainesville and buy a bass amp. He’d made a strong enough impression on me the couple of times we had met that I instinctively knew this was the right decision.

  Our first tour together was awkward initially. I was spending hours in a van with people I hardly knew, with the exception of James. I missed Dustin and Kevin immediately. It still felt like such a strange thing to be playing songs without Kevin, my musical kindred spirit. Against Me! started to adopt a new personality with this lineup, since we were no longer a group of anarchists fueled by activism and revolution who were all on the same page, politically. Warren and I were the only two still sheepishly claiming the title in interviews from time to time. The common denominator among us was a love of getting fucked up. We all liked to party, so we decided to become known as the hardest-partying band.

  The more beers we drank, and the more miles we notched on the odometer, the more we started to click and become a tight unit. That first tour together ended in a bonding experience of a drunken game of spin the bottle with a group of college girls in Tennessee. We were all in relationships back in Gainesville, but on that night, it didn’t matter. We were willing to tongue-kiss each other for the chance to tongue-kiss them. I made out with Warren, for chrissake. Even thinking about that now makes me feel like there are still beard hairs stuck in my teeth. After the game ended, I left with a tall brunette, and we found an alley doorway to make out in.

  “This is probably the worst decision that I’ve ever made,” I told her.

  She laughed and smiled, and said, “I’m sure you do this all the time, right?”

  I arrived back home filled with guilt over my infidelity. My secret lasted only a couple of hours before coming clean to my wife. She promptly exploded at me in a rage of fists and expletives. I begged for forgiveness, but she raked me over the coals, calling me a child that she had to take care of. Home life turned from miserable to soul-sucking.

  We still tried to make it work for a while after that, but Danielle hung it over my head, and became constantly suspicious of me. During one shift at the Top, she found C.C. and me sharing a cigarette in the parking lot and accused us of having an affair. I started becoming suspicious of her, too, hearing rumors around town of guys she was close with. When I read her journal and found out about other men, I moved out, crashing with Andrew and his fiancée, Verité.

  Not long after, I was closing down the bar and the Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)” was playing on the jukebox. C.C. pulled me into the handicapped bathroom and locked the door behind us. I thought I was being dragged away to do a quick bump, since that was the best place to do them. Instead she slammed me up against the wall and shoved her tongue down my throat. I pulled her head back by a handful of hair while she bit into my lip with her teeth and tugged at my belt. She pressed against me on the sink, kissing my neck. I felt her breath on my ear as she whispered, “Let’s get out of here…”

  We left the bar, heading to a hotel on the outskirts of town. I was driving drunk and crashed into a parked car on my way out of the parking lot, but we made it there. The sex was drunken, coked-up, and nervous. I could barely stay hard. I can still picture her after we finished, standing naked in the hotel room, rail-thin, white skin. I counted each rib by the light of passing headlights. I listened to her on the phone, telling her husband that we were finishing up in the bar, that she loved him and she’d be home soon.

  I’m sorry. I loved her, too.

  “Girl, I’m sorry, but I’m leaving, we’re both at fault, we’re both to blame. And it wasn’t the other men ’cause there were other women. This just isn’t love, it’s just the remorse of a loss of a feeling. Even if I stayed it just wouldn’t be the same.”

  The success of Reinventing Axl Rose garnered the attention of the San Francisco–based independent punk label Fat Wreck Chords, which was owned by NOFX frontman Fat Mike, arguably the world’s most famous punk. Despite his penchant for S&M and bestiality humor, Mike is a shrewd businessman, known for his pointy mohawk spikes and blunt attitude.

  NOFX had ridden the mid-90s wave of commercially successful punk rock. West Coast bands like them, Green Day, and the Offspring had crossover success into the mainstream, which netted them millions of records sold. Green Day’s Dookie went diamond after its 1994 release, and the Offspring’s Smash, with 11 million copies sold, became the best-selling independent release of all time. Not only was Mike prolific with NOFX during this period, but his label reaped the trickle-down rewards of the genre’s brief popularity.

  We received an email from Toby Jeg, an employee at the label, asking if Against Me! would be interested in recording an EP for Fat’s monthly seven-inch club. I turned him down and somewhat brazenly asked if they would instead put out our next full-length. He told me he’d run it by Mike.

  James and I were driving when I got the call from Mike, who had done his homework on us. He told us how many copies of Reinventing had sold, which was news to us.

  “So by my estimation, you guys are worth about $25,000 right now. How about we go with that,” he said. “I’ll give you $25,000 to put out the next album with Fat Wreck, sound good?”

  “Yeah, that sounds reasonable,” I said, playing it cool, trying my best not to let my excitement bleed through. Not only was this a guy whose band I grew up listening to, but given that we did our last record for just 800 bucks, $25,000 seemed like all the money in the world.

  “How ready are you to record? You almost there?” he asked.

  “Totally,
we’re ready,” I said. “The album is written”—which was a total lie. “We can record at the end of the next tour.”

  We reached an agreement, and I hung up to a raucous celebration. James and I screamed and yelled, hugging each other and punching the van’s roof in victory. We were dead fucking broke, and this was more money than any of us had ever seen. We couldn’t believe our luck. But not everyone was as excited as we were.

  Because Fat Wreck Chords was financially successful, to some in the DIY punk scene, it was considered a “sellout” label, deemed too corporate for punk blood, even though it was technically an indie operation, based out of a downtown office/warehouse space. Still, we had given No Idea the chance to counteroffer, without telling them we were talking to Fat. We asked for a $2,000 advance to put a down payment on a new van, and they said no. Var, the owner of No Idea, would pay me seven dollars an hour every other week to clean the fish shit out of the tropical fish tanks scattered throughout the office, but he wouldn’t help with a tour van. Fat Mike was offering us a comparative fortune. The choice was made.

  When word got out that we had “signed” with Fat (even though no paperwork was ever inked, and our arrangement was based entirely on a proverbial handshake), the punks got angry. When I say the punks were angry, I may be understating it a bit. I mean, they were furious. Maximum Rocknroll, the zine I’d read religiously as a teenager and used as a guide to book my first tour, published a column in one issue urging people to sabotage our shows at all costs. And they did. People tried to take the instruments out of our hands while we were playing, they threw stink bombs at us on stage, they poured bleach all over our merch, our van became a travelling canvas for their graffiti. For a long time, we drove around with a huge tag on the door, spray-painted by some punks whose outrage was so blindingly strong that it impaired their spelling: AGIANST ME! SUCKS.

  After playing a show at a Polish VFW hall on Long Island, New York—a show with an $8 admission that had been set up and promoted by a 16-year-old fan—we drove away in a rumbling van. We pulled over to investigate, only to find that all of our tires had been slashed. During an altercation at another show over our flat tires, some militant DIY punk picked up a brick to threaten us with.

  “Go home, you fucking sellout!” he shouted. I turned my back and walked away in disgust. This was the punk scene that meant so much to me? Fuck this, fuck DIY, and fuck you, I thought.

  Initially I had been attracted to punk and anarchism because I saw them as a means to make a positive change, where everyone was equal. While there were some people in the scene who upheld those values, the more punks I dealt with, the more I realized that most of them were privileged white kids taking advantage of this idealism. On so many occasions, when it came time to divide the door money up at house shows, I witnessed artists get fucked over in the split. I saw what their so-called revolution was really about, and I was over it.

  Aside from the small but rabid cabal waged against us, things were going well. Since I had lied to Mike about having a record nearly written, I doubled the working pace on new songs. I frantically penned lyrics in my notebook during downtime on tour, and, in the brief weeks at home, I worked out melodies to accompany them. Miraculously, I cobbled together 12 songs across a summer, and, while most were loud, distorted rock songs, three were stripped-down and acoustic as a nod to Against Me!’s roots.

  As promised, Fat Wreck released our second album, Against Me! as the Eternal Cowboy, at the end of 2003, and had the resources to actively promote it. All of a sudden, doors were opening for us. We had a publicist and were getting positive press; we had a booking agent and months’ worth of touring lined up. The road was wide open in front of us, and we just kept driving. We’re never going home, I thought to myself.

  Our first big tour made us a guaranteed $500 a night opening for Anti-Flag, an established punk band from Pittsburgh. Since they had been professionally touring for years, they ran a tight ship to keep things on schedule. Or at least they tried to. Still having some of that rambunctious teenager in me, for three straight months I bucked against the rules and regulations they imposed, and relentlessly antagonized them. It started on the first day when they handed us our tour laminates, telling us we had to wear them at all times and would be subject to a $20 fee if we lost them. This was so absurd to me that I took my revenge out on them in the form of subtle pranks. When they left Gatorade bottles lying around the green room, I sneaked them out, pissed in them, and put them back. I stole their rider book and hid it until their tour manager had a fit looking for it. I’m not sure if Anti-Flag had assumed they’d be taking us new kids under their wing when they offered us the tour, but I can’t imagine they didn’t regret the decision to do so.

  It felt like we were gaining momentum on the Anti-Flag tour, and fast. We were usually listed in the third slot on a bill of five or six bands, and we blew every other band off the stage every single time, at least in our minds. We picked up more fans each night, and our live show was getting tighter and wilder as people learned our lyrics. When the tour ended, none of us wanted to lose that pace, so we hopped on another one. And another. All in all, we played over 130 shows in 2003 and then over 180 shows in 2004. That’s a lot of touring. It was paying off, though, and we built fan bases in every city.

  We all loved going to places we had never been before, and jumped at offers to do overseas tours when they started coming in. Now we were slowly crossing all of Europe off the list, and then Australia and Japan, too. I got my first taste of the anarchist scene overseas, and it made me realize how full of shit everyone was back home. The people living in squats in Europe—which were true squats—took care of traveling bands, providing a five-course dinner and beer all night. I was blown away when we arrived in Leipzig, Germany, and entered a huge, run-down concrete building in which the basement club space housed an underground society full of skateboarders riding halfpipes and artists crafting huge sculptures out of metal. These were people truly living off the grid, not just at their moms’ houses.

  All the travel and excitement around me was distracting and good for my lingering heartbreak over my failed marriage. With no cell phone or internet, I was cut off from the world for months at a time and was starting to feel more at home on the bench seat in the van than in a bed back home.

  At age 23, with $13,000 in my bank account, I quit my job checking IDs at the Top. Andrew married Verité; James moved in with his girlfriend, Anne, who was also my roommate; and Warren bought a pool table.

  Eternal Cowboy was the start of an era for Against Me!. It was recorded at Ardent Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, a location I chose because I was on a Replacements kick at the time and wanted to do it at the same place they had recorded my favorite album, Pleased to Meet Me. I checked the album’s liner notes and called the studio listed to book us two weeks there. Upon arriving, I realized it was the nicest studio I’d ever been to, and I felt overwhelmed. Looking at all of the studio’s equipment made me nervous about tampering with the raw sound that had come to define Against Me!.

  The album solidified the band’s musical identity for years to come. After that, Against Me! was officially me, James, Andrew, and Warren. Through writing and recording it, I realized that I would be taking on a new role in the band as its leader. From growing up playing with Kevin, I had always thought music to be a collaborative effort. An ardent anarchist, I believed everyone’s efforts to be considered equally. But the guys rarely brought song ideas to practices, so the majority of the songwriting responsibility fell on me. After a while, I stopped trying to force contributions out of them, and I begrudgingly became the group’s frontperson.

  Not long after Eternal Cowboy came out, a strange thing happened. Major labels started taking interest in our little band. I was first contacted by Stay Gold, a sublabel of Universal Records, about putting out our next album. Back then, being juvenile and obnoxiously punk rock as I was, I enjoyed pulling pranks on people. I had seen the Sex Pistols’ mockumentary, T
he Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, dozens of times. The punk band made hilarity out of embezzling money from big record labels, and I saw this as an opportunity to pull our own version of it.

  “There’s no way I’m dealing with a sublabel,” I barked at them like a seasoned rock star. “Gimme your boss!” But weirdly enough, not only did Universal not tell me to piss off, they went along with it. A 23-year-old with holes in the bottoms of his sneakers was snapping orders at them through a prepaid cell phone, and they were calling me “Mr. Gabel.”

  “You’ll have to speak to my lawyer about that,” I would tell them whenever they called and wanted to talk business. I’d then direct them to Toby from Fat, who acted as our attorney under the name Danny Shapiro, and would “yes” them to death on our behalf.

  Other major labels also started reaching out to us about the album, one after another, until it became overwhelming and we needed someone to handle it all. In 2004, when interest in Against Me! was at its highest, we were contacted by Tom Sarig, who at the time managed Le Tigre among other bands, asking if we were looking for management. I held Le Tigre—especially their singer, former Bikini Kill frontwoman and riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna—in high regard. I thought that if Sarig was a good choice for her band, then he was a good choice for ours, too. Though I’m not sure the rest of the band was sold on him, or on the idea of having a manager in general, I insisted that we have someone representing us, so I hired him. His first order of business was organizing a bidding war among all the major labels—Virgin, Sony, Warner, Universal—and pitting them against each other.

  None of this struck me as odd at the time. It seemed like fate being fulfilled. I was young and arrogant, and I felt we deserved the high-profile attention because we were just that good. My politics were flawless, our songs killed, no one was better live than us, I thought. Damn right, major labels should want a piece of us. It was all part of the plan. I had some ego.